How to check if an account was exposed in the Ashley Madison hack

The homepage of the Ashley Madison website is displayed on an iPad, in this photo illustration taken in Ottawa, Canada July 21, 2015.
(REUTERS/Chris Wattie)

Impact Team, the morally inclined Ashley Madison hackers who compromised the personal information of over 36 million users of the extramarital site, lived up to their name and their threat made last month to expose the dirty details of the unfaithful on the dark Web.

The 9.7 gigabyte data dump, posted Tuesday, includes email addresses, phone numbers, logins, account details, and -- oh yes -- the sexual fetishes and preferences of millions of users. Although the information was initially accessible only via a specialized Tor Browser or Onion router, some companies have made it easily accessible for the average computer user.

You can now visit Trustify, enter an email and see if it has been hacked, or do the same at https://ashley.cynic.al. Just enter any email address associated with someone and unlock the secrets of the unknown, now known to you and anyone else with that email address.

A disclosure to this "how to find your cheater," however, is that Ashley Madison does not verify email addresses. This means someone who made an account didn't necessarily use the account, but we'll leave that to the discretion of the searcher. And since cheating and lying go hand in hand, some of the information leaked may be inaccurate.

A Wired sampling of the data indicates that users likely provided random numbers and addresses, but files containing credit card transactions provide real names and address. However, complete credit card numbers were not disclosed by the hack. Rather, each transaction is represented by a four digit number that may indicate a transaction code or the last four digits of a credit card.

"Times Up" read the title of a message posted by Impact Team addressed to ALM, the parent company to Ashley Madison and Established Men, right before the release. The message explains why the life decimating information was released claiming, "We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data." The messages ends with a life lesson to the exposed Ashley Madison users about funneling their anger toward ALM and not them.